T h e Nordic Swan 2015 – Performance indicators for ecolabelling

The Nordic Swan is a voluntary environmental and consumer policy instrument that was launched in the Nordic countries in 1989. Ever since, the scheme has grown with increasing numbers of product groups and licence holders. Similarly, the number of ecolabelled products in the market place has also grown, resulting in a growing financial turnover. The Nordic Swan has furthermore also been joined by additional parallel ecolabelling schemes. Just like other policy instruments, the Nordic Swan is subject to evaluations. As of yet, the scheme has been evaluated three times and questions regarding quantitative information on performance and efficiency of the Nordic scheme and comparability with other schemes have been recurrent issues in connection to these evaluations. Beside policy-makers and people in charge of the scheme, market actors are also interested in the question, to decide to what extent they should consider the ecolabel when acting on the market. These market actors could be consumers who seek for guidance, producers in need for trustworthy market communication channels, consumer and environmental NGOs needing to know if they should promote the ecolabel among their members, etc. These and other reasons call for appropriate information systems that bring forward the requested information in, for instance, suitable systematically selected and standardised indicators. Such indicators could be used for various purposes, for example documenting trends in performance and efficiency of the scheme, making comparisons of different schemes, benchmarking studies for mutual learning and continual improvements, to name a few. We propose that the Nordic Swan scheme prioritises developing indicators to track changes in internal performance and efficiency. Pilot studies could be developed on comparisons of differences between the national competent bodies of the Nordic Swan, as well as the EU Ecolabel. Pushing joint development of indicator sets for comparisons as collaborative projects with other schemes, for instance the EU Ecolabel, is on one hand desirable but can also become time-consuming. We therefore suggest that such projects are given lower priorit